What is all this Twitter Fascination All About?

The more I want to learn about social media it is apparent that you need to focus on the Big Four (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube) if you are going to make a name for yourself online. Granted I’m new to the scene and I’m open for suggestions or comments if I should focus on anything else. Today I am going to focus on Twitter Only.

Like in any new subject matter I did some research and found a wonderful research site which broke out some interesting statistics on Twitter Users and Demographics. Here is what they stated when breaking out Twitter Statistics Only:

• Teens are not using Twitter in large numbers. While teens are bigger users of almost all other online applications, Twitter is an exception.

• 8% of internet users ages 12-17 use Twitter.2 This makes Twitter as common among teens as visiting a virtual world, and far less common than sending or receiving text messages — as 66% of teens do — or going online for news and political information, done by 62% of online teens.

• Older teens are more likely to use Twitter than their younger counterparts; 10% of online teens ages 14-17 do so, compared with 5% of those ages 12-13.

• High-school-age girls are particularly likely to use Twitter. 13% of online girls ages 14-17 use Twitter, compared with 7% of boys that age.

• Using different wording, we find that 19% of adult internet users use Twitter or similar services to post short status updates and view the updates of others online.

• Young adults lead the way when it comes to using Twitter or status updating. One-third of online 18-29 year-olds post or read status updates.

* Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults: by Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith and Kathryn Zickuhr, Pew Internet & American Life Project (February 3, 2010) http://pewresearch.org

What I get out of these numbers is that Teens use other social media sites and that Young Adult from 18-29 make up most of the Twitter Community. Granted these demographics probably change all the time. I have a feeling that older adults between the Ages 30-64 will get more involved in Twitter as they become more accustomed to the internet.

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